Rae Cairns Books in Order

If you want publication order: The Good Mother → Dying to Know
If you like family secrets under pressure: The Good Mother → Dying to Know
If you want a Sydney mystery first: Dying to Know → The Good Mother

Rae Cairns came to crime fiction by way of a lot of other lives. Long before she published a novel, she was acting, singing, dancing, travelling, working with young people, and storing up the kind of real world detail that would later give her thrillers their emotional pull.

Storytelling was there early. She has said her first acting job was a shampoo commercial when she was eighteen months old, and she spent her teenage years singing and dancing, including time at the NSW Conservatorium of Music and a year performing in North America and Europe. After that she completed a degree in Performing Arts, then realised the entertainment industry was not where she wanted to stay.

Then Belfast changed the direction of her life.

Through Australian Volunteers Abroad, Cairns went to Belfast during the final years of the Troubles and mentored disadvantaged young people, many of them from paramilitary families. The experience stayed with her. So did the people. Years later, it became the seed of The Good Mother, a thriller about a Sydney mother forced back to Northern Ireland when the past closes in.

Back in Australia, she kept working close to the sharp edges of ordinary life. She co-managed a crisis refuge for street children in Sydney’s inner city, then worked as Program Director for the Sydney Olympic Youth Camp, organising activities for 400 young people from around the world. You can see the same interest running through her fiction: she is drawn to pressure, loyalty, fear, and what people do when the people they love are suddenly at risk.

That question sits at the center of her books.

The Good Mother introduced many readers to Cairns’s style, fast-moving suspense built around family, moral pressure, and women who have to dig deep when their world starts to collapse. The book was shortlisted for Best Debut Crime Fiction in the 2021 Ned Kelly Awards and longlisted for the 2021 Davitt Awards. Her second novel, Dying to Know, shifts the tension to Sydney and follows Geneva Leighton as she tries to uncover what happened to her missing sister while caring for the children left behind. Across both books, Cairns returns to familiar concerns: belonging, motherhood, guilt, survival, and the cost of keeping secrets.

She started writing fiction later than some authors do. Cairns has said it was only after her children reached their teens that she found the time and head space to begin properly. She has also spoken openly about being diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis while The Good Mother was being pitched, and about how that changed her process. Instead of handwriting early drafts, she now uses speech-to-text software.

These days she lives in Sydney with her pilot husband, two adult children, and her dog, Cookie. When she is not writing, she likes to read, hike, and travel. It sounds like a busy, full life, which fits an author whose books keep asking what ordinary people are capable of when life suddenly stops being ordinary.